Werner Breig, Craft and Magic: Forges and Forging in Wagner’s ‘Ring’

Two lines of historical enquiry are linked in the theme of this article: first, the tradition of associating the blacksmith’s craft with music, as we find in the Pythagoras legend and in the Old Testament brothers Jubal and Tubalcain; and, secondly, the story of the modern reception of the medieval German and Old Norse Nibelung material. It is as blacksmiths that we first encounter the Nibelungs in Wagner’s Ring; their prince, Alberich, has forged from the Rhinegold ‘with great and cunning art a ring, which has given him supreme power over his own race of Nibelungs’. And in a departure from tradition we are also presented with Siegfried as the forger of his own sword, an act that confirms his status as a free-willed hero.